I've gone to quite a few open homes around Auckland lately.
Haven't received one follow phone call from an agent.
Guess they aren't hungry enough to be chasing buyers yet.

There are professional agents, those who do what they do as a business, creating quality data bases of buyers and sellers, who chase down sales and even in a hot market chase down buyers to maximize sales price - these are the agents I sell with. These agents are the ones who will survive a slowdown in the market.

Then there are agents who get into RE as a low qualification required job sometimes as a career change when they get sick of whatever it was that they did and decide to make a change, some of these guys/gals spend little time developing their 'business' and are more 'order takers' than sales people. They're the ones who make sales in a hot market to the first person who turns up with cash. They don't know how to sell they're lazy and when the buyers drop away they don't know how to generate interest, negotiate with prospective buyers or handle objections. The sales dry up for these guys and they go back to whatever it is they used to do.

If sales volumes continue at this low level, we will see the no. of agents drop dramatically. Where I operate a local agent told me their agency did 16 sales in a month (might have been August) double the next agency, with 11 agents in the office, he did 3 of them and wasn't the top agent. With min 7 (of 11) sales from 2 agents the remaining 9 agents shared 4 sales amongst them. In a location where average sales are $600k at 4% commission $24k commission befor agencies cut (say a third) - the remaining 14 agents made on average $1100 each gross. How long can they maintain this level of income?

The second agency in monthly sales doing 8 sales has a lot of agents too. Not sure the exact number but it would be 10+. Might be a lot of 2 min noodles on the menu for thsee agents.